“Vassal” is a Latinized Celtic word, the encyclopedia says, with "gwas" meaning slave boy. Nowadays, it seems EU countries are “vassal states,” seemingly independent, but their decision-making powers have been significantly constrained and dictated by the U.S., becoming more like “slave states” as in medieval Europe.
When the boss told them last week that they were nothing, their defense alliance, NATO, is useless without the U.S., they hid their sobbing eyes behind a pair of reflective silver-framed aviator sunglasses from the Louis Vuitton Attitude Pilote collection (with a hefty $995 price tag). (In fact, Mr. Macron wasn't throwing shade at anyone but covering the burst blood vessel in one of his eyes, which is medically known as a sub-conjunctival haemorrhage. Google says, it could happen with a strong sneeze, cough, stress and nonstop crying.)
Europe failed its test from 1910 to 1945, at each other’s throats, and finally killing 76 million people combined in the two world wars. The Americans rushed to save them from themselves, but they looked the other way when, finally, all nations in continental Europe decided to sacrifice 6 million European Jews. Americans thought that helping the Zionists occupy and colonize Palestine was a way of expiation or propitiation for not holding all those responsible but sentencing only 10 (that's right, only 10) German officials to death. Despite a series of postwar trials, many perpetrators of Nazi-era criminality have never been tried or punished.
Those Europeans, like the current leaders of the EU countries, were educated in ancient Hellenistic literature and knew the story Aesop told of a gnat and a bull. The pest flies over the meadow with much buzzing for so small a creature and settles on the tip of the bull’s horn; and after resting a second, he makes ready to fly away. But before he leaves, he begs the bull's pardon for having used his horn for a resting place.
“You must be very glad to have me go now,” he says; the bull replies, “I did not even know you were there.” Aesop’s own conclusion of this short story is actually a lesson for humanity: The smaller the mind, the greater the conceit.
The European fireflies thought they were so important players in world politics that they could win any battle they entered. They had greater importance in our own eyes than in the eyes of the other nations.
Not that he has a small mind, but British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s telling his lawmakers that he would not yield to pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump was not conceitedly boasting? The same goes for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. But when he said, “Middle powers must act together to be at the table if they don’t want to be on the menu,” he was implying that “middle powers” could prevent powerful nations’ economic coercion to get what they want. Carney did not mention Trump by name, but everyone at the Davos annual conference of the World Economic Forum (WEF), who thunderously applauded him, knew he aimed at the U.S. president.
I don’t necessarily mean that those at Davos have small minds, but it seems their arrogance is so great that they have an inflated opinion of Europe, thinking European countries have accomplished so much since the 1993 Maastricht Agreement, creating the EU. Now, they have an inflated ranking of Europe's abilities compared to the U.S.
If Aesop were around, we’d ask him if there are other sources more conceited than small minds; apparently, there are other reasons to feel arrogant. Not only Europeans put on airs, but others, too, ride a high horse. For example, the American attitude that is so famous, it could create an entry in the economic dictionary titled “global arrogance.” Washington depends on its hegemony (or what it thinks it has) over the other nations.
Europe did not depend on its sense of hegemony, so it has “the anti-coercion instrument,” nicknamed “the trade bazooka,” to regulate its responses to economic coercion by third countries. Europe, as always, will create a commission to examine, engage and adopt countermeasures. Why do they call it a “bazooka”? I guess, if a nation, say, the U.S., uses external economic pressure on a EU member or on the whole community, Europeans believe that they have what they call “geo-legality” as a legal-normative authority and they can defend it with a bazooka as they’ll defend their homeland (and/or Ukraine) against Russia (and/or China).
Are they going to use that instrument against the U.S. to exert external economic pressure on those EU members that will not recognize the U.S. takeover of Greenland by military force or by purchasing it from Denmark, an EU founding member? Trump, being Trump, may change his mind about the whole Greenland scheme, and the Europeans are still counting on his blowing hot and cold and changing his mind so fast and so frequently. But he came to Davos, and those people heard him mumbling about acquiring the island despite the “tremendous respect” he has for the people of Greenland and Denmark.
Trump doesn’t care that his Greenland push risks undermining the world's legal order. His threats to seize the autonomous Danish territory have raised fears for the future of sovereignty and international law, but he doesn’t give a hoot. He knows, but the Europeans don’t, that there will be only three centers of power in the new world, and Europe is not one of them. The post-Cold War era unipolar American hegemony is ending, and the European analysts love to predict that a multi-polar world is going to replace it. Instead, a tripolar order is going to be created, composed of the U.S., China and the Russian Federation. We can even say it has already been institutionalized and is already operational in 21st-century geopolitics.
Sleepy American Democrats and Republicans blindly following Trump in every direction he runs are not fully aware of it, nor are the EU goons. But they need to answer the question of whose vassal state Europeans are willing to be: America’s or Russia’s. If their conceit is not the result of the size of their mind or if they do not suffer any other psychotic disorder, they should stop those delusions, or plans for remaking the world in accord with their own wishes and fantasies, but consult either Trump, Russia's President Vladimir Putin or China's Jinping Xi to find out what sort of relationship they have in mind about their new allies: vassal or slave relationship.
